In just a few days Reverse Thieves will officially be a decade old. I swear sometime in those ten years I made a Murray Head’s Chess reference on the blog but I could not find it with a casual search of our posts so I think I can use it and declare no harm, no foul. I just ask for a bit of forgiveness if I say name a post “One Night in Mariejois and the World’s Your Oyster” within the next decade.
Fate/Apocrypha is an odd beast. It began life in back in the day before mobile games were a thing and the game everyone wanted to be was World of Warcraft. If nothing else Type-Moon has been pretty good at adapting their properties to different mediums in order to seize on what is popular. If you have ever seen Fate/Complete Material Volume IV you will see that they had a whole slew of Servants by different artists for the initial release of the game. For various reasons the game was canceled and the designs for the characters and the general premise of a two team Holy Grail War mostly became a bit of trivia for hardcore fans. A few of the Servants from Fate/Apocrypha found their way into other Type-Moon titles like Fate/Extra but overall it was more a case of what could have been.
As time went on light novels became the popular trend swept the otaku markets and Type-Moon has never been a company to ignore such opportunities. In 2011 they took the overall concept of the Great Holy Grail War and with Yuichiro Higashide made some tweaks to the story so it would work as a series of novels. This led to some changes to the background and the Servants involved but the general framework of the plot was adapted fairly straight.
If nothing else each of the Servants who were dropped from the original concept of Fate/Apocrypha have made their way into Fate/Grand Order. At the same time, all but a few notable exception from Fate/Apocrypha have made their way into Fate/Grand Order. With a Fate/Apocrypha event on the horizon, all of them should be in the game by the end of the year. In fact, if they don’t add Semiramis soon there maybe been some riots in the street of Akihabara.
The novels have been popular enough to get a manga and anime adaptation so here we are today. Unlike most of the other Type-Moon anime, I have written about I only know the broad strokes of the plot. I know most of the characters involved, some major plot points, and some big spoilers but details on anything and some major chunks of the plot will be as much of a surprise to me as they are to a good deal of the audience. So this time I will be as much of a tourist as many of the people reading these post. Sometimes even more so if any of you can read Japanese.
So let’s begin our journey together and see where it leads us.
Reverse Thieves 